She coins it the “gay vacation town of
the Northeast.” Imagine a historically Puritanical backdrop bespeckled with shivering, bikini-clad men on rollerblades.
There, Kendra was surrounded by images
of sexuality, leading her to question her
own sexual identity at an early age.
“I had crushes on gay men, drag
queens, and lesbian women. It was a constant parade of gender representations;
sex was a performance there.”
Though her physical appearance—
borderline mousy, short brunette hair,
a nose stud, and a penchant for dangly
earrings—is not as intimidating or bombastic as that of a transvestite, her lyric is.
Poems like “The Strap-on Speaks” reflect
her tumultuous relationship with femininity.
“Sexuality has always been an obsession for me,” Kendra explains. Despite
her lack of experience as an outright victim of sexual violence, she has always felt
a deep sensitivity towards misogyny and
homophobia.
“Me and my close friend, now a married gay woman, used to be very militant
when we were young, without knowing
why. We just knew certain things were
wrong, and that we needed to defend ourselves from them.”
But though she’s had girlfriends, she
never feels the need to categorize her
sexuality. At the core, she identifies as a
human.
When she applies for grants, as MFA-

38 / / / / / / / / /

wielding artists often do, Kendra describes her own poetry as dealing with
what it means to be on the threshold
of sexual identity. I get the feeling that
she doesn’t particularly relish painting
all of her work with the same brushstroke, but her description, unsurprisingly, is spot-on. Her poems wade
non-stagnantly in the no man’s land of
androgyny. And like the androgynous
nature of Patti Smith or David Bowie,
it has an unmistakably arousing and
gravitating quality. Accessing a voice
that transcends gender, Kendra says, is
one of her biggest victories in writing.
Her lines are normally unaligned and
enjambed, betraying another truth about
Kendra—she deconstructs not only gender but language itself. But she doesn’t
intend to obscure the meaning of her
words. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Kendra relishes Ilya Kaminsky’s idea of
“breaking language to wake you up.”
“The entire time I’ve been writing poetry, people have been telling me that it’s
too much; it’s excessive, or there are too
many images canceling each other out.”
But she doesn’t care about too many images. She wants to express the wild, allencompassing, mortal nature of her poetic self. Rules are for the real world.
“When I’m writing,” she begins, “I really like to free myself from those sorts
of constructs.” She tries to write three
pages every morning, not for production, but for purging. As a writer myself,

I understand this impulse. Her poems
are crowded not only with images, but
also with sounds and ineffable emotions,
which might otherwise blindingly buzz in
her imagination.
Happily shipwrecked in Nashville since
earning her MFA at Vanderbilt in 2011,
Kendra lives in 12South with her fiancé, a
screenwriter (and a man, in case you were
wondering). She’s taking a break from
full-time teaching to work on her manuscript, which she hopes to turn into her